In 1939, Kenneth Williams arrived in Batavia to attend the New York State School for the Blind. He was 7. After his first night there, no one helped him with his bed. That continued for a few days, until the blankets were so lumpy the child could hardly sleep.

Williams went to his instructors and asked: Isn't it time for someone to make the bed?

Absolutely, they replied. If you want to learn, we'll teach you.

It was the beginning of a philosophy he still takes to work each morning. At the school, they wouldn't allow him to accept limitations. Instead, the message was the opposite:

"We blind kids," Williams said, "had to be just a little bit better than our counterparts."

Born almost a decade before World War II, Williams never knew his father. When he was two, his mother handed him over to foster care. This was long before the civil rights gains that helped transform the lives of the disabled. He routinely encountered hostility and rejection.

Logically, Williams had every reason to give up.

But his teachers helped give form to a tenacity he'd carried since his birth. Completely blind, Williams learned to exude a gentle confidence. In Batavia, they taught him a critical lesson: If you don't want to be exploited once you're out in the world, project quiet faith in your own abilities.

Today?

He is a piano tuner, but that title hardly captures his lofty status in the music community. Williams is the longtime piano tuner for the Syracuse Jazz Fest, which begins Friday. For decades, he's tuned pianos at the New York State Fair. He's handled similar duties at Onondaga Community College since the school opened in the early 1960s.

Among the countless performances in which he's played a role: Tony Bennett. The Eagles. James Taylor.

Kenneth Williams tunes a 9-foot Steinway piano at Artist Pianos in East Syracuse. Williams, who is totally blind, is revered for his skills throughout greater Syracuse.Mike Greenlar | mgreenlar@syracuse.com

"He's a genius," said Frank Malfitano, founder and executive director of Jazz Fest.

"He's one of the best who've ever been around Syracuse," said Scott Schroeter, manager of Artist Pianos in East Syracuse, where Williams still works, at 82.

"He's unique, with a wonderful ear," said Kevin Moore, an OCC professor of piano who's known Williams since the 1970s.

If Williams has a secret, this is it: For him, listening is everything -- skill, discipline and strategy. He navigates the world by sorting noise into distinct and often beautiful sounds. Over the years, people have often asked Williams how he tunes pianos amid the tumultuous clatter of the state fair.

He said he mentally sifts through all the ruckus. Even as he leans over an open piano, his head so close to the instrument he seems a part of it, he wills himself to separate the sound of each key from the conversations all around him. When he goes to Syracuse Chiefs games -- as he often does -- he said he can usually tell how far a ball will go simply by gauging the sound when it meets a bat.

"I don't know how he does what he does," said Leslie Kraus, an old friend and secretary of OCC's music department.

She is equally impressed by his skill as a mimic, both with celebrities -- ask for his knockout version of the late Walter Cronkite -- or with the voices of everyday friends and colleagues that he meets.

As for tuning a piano, the joy of it keeps him working in his 80s. He sees the task, when done well, as a kind of miracle. His job, he said, is to take what was once simply wire on a coil and to work with it until a piano "has a voice. It speaks."

That ethic, Malfitano said, makes him a civic treasure and a Jazz Fest legend: "The guy is respected, revered and he's invaluable."

What he pursues, said Kevin Moore, "is a purity of sound."

Williams presents no bitterness in describing the harsh years of his youth, near Watertown. He's been told he began life with sight, until -- as an infant -- he developed some minor eye problems. Staff members at a hospital made a catastrophic mistake: They applied so much medicine, he said, that it literally burned away his vision.

The baby's mother, overwhelmed, "walked out on me," Williams said.

He was thrown into foster care, a sequence filled with such violence that he describes it as "hell on Earth." The break that changed everything came when North Country administrators decided traditional schools were not prepared to serve this child.

They sent him to Batavia, to the school for the blind.

It was a revelation. Staff did not see a boy with a disability; they saw the whole child. Williams learned to play trumpet, although the challenge of affording even a white shirt or a pair of decent shoes - coupled with his growing urge for independence - ignited his lifetime passion for hard work.

Williams wanted to play piano, but struggled. A teacher suggested the next best thing:

Why not learn to tune the instrument?

Once he graduated, Williams took that skill to Syracuse. A caseworker managed to get him a few months of welfare, he said. She had faith he'd never need that help again, and Williams -- to this day -- does his best to prove her right.

In the early 1950s, he accepted a position at the old Clark Music shop in downtown Syracuse. When a man who tuned pianos for ice shows at the Onondaga County War Memorial was injured in a fall, Williams was hired to take his place.

Sixty years later, he hasn't stopped. Williams said he tunes, on average, about two pianos a day. Each job takes a couple of hours. Twice widowed, he boards in Camillus with his friends, Mike and Jayne Barnes. He hires a driver to help him get around the city.

Even now, he approaches life as he did as a boy in Batavia: He listens, he feels his way, and he adapts. Technology, in significant ways, makes his life easier: It has provided him what he calls his "talking toys," such as a watch that announces the time, or a small device that can distinguish different amounts of paper money.

At Jazz Fest, as he locks in sweet notes that give voice to each piano, Williams will be living out the ethic his teachers felt was so critical for children, without sight:

"You can't express doubt," he said. "If you do, you're lost."

Email columnist Sean Kirst at skirst@syracuse.com; write to him in care of The Post-Standard, 220 S. Warren St., Syracuse 13202; or send him a note on Facebook or Twitter.